I've started noticing a pattern with google.. I've always kept a close eye on my rank position for this certian keyword. But For some reason, my site will be the top of the serps for this "keyword" then for some reason google kills the site (removes the site from the serps or buries it 10 pages down) then google will bring it back. So today I noticed my hits today where down..guess what? GOogle has killed my site again. Is this the dreaded sandbox everyone speaks of?
Same thing happened to my site. Maybe its what they call the 'google dance"? I don't know. Hey what software do you use to track where your website is placed?
usually when you go for a ride in "the sandbox", you stay there for a long time - that's why it's no fun.. what you're describing is more like the GoogleDance, or the Google RollerCoaster... For an established site this would seem unusual.. How old is your site?
Well, do you have a lot of backlinks - that are high PR and such? I've also experienced this problem in the past as well.
I do believe it's a data refresh rather than something personal...I too have been tracking this phenomenon with my own site, to my dismay, but not to the extent you have. There seem three possibilities: 1. Those of us who are link-building notice this because we are the ones bringing on overoptimization penalties. They are temporary, we go back to link-building, and all get collectively yanked again. 2. Those of us trying to rise in the SERPs notice this because we are watching carefully to see where we rank, and it happens to many sites. 3. Google has at least three times this month reverted to old data while filtering new results. Several DC's seem down right now which supports this. Most people think it is their site; I disagree. In my case, only my homepage seems affected, which of course is where all my latest links are pointing as well. I think that this is happening to a lot of people and this thread should establish a place to share our continued results.
exactly the same thing is happening with one of my sites and has been for over 2 months. I have a quality, well established site, over 4 years old with an abundance of well written content. our traffic has been steady from yahoo, msn etc but google is playing games with us. one of our major keyphrases will be number 5 one day then number 40 the next, this is accross the board for all keyphrases in google. its a rollercoaster, we have about 5 solid positions for very competitive keyphrases that have remained the same for over 2 years, every other keyword is on the first page one day, the 6th page the next. I wish I could figure out what on earth is going on.
The site is almost 2 months old. Funny thing is now I checked and my site is back on page 1 for the keyword again. So all is good..phew. Its from sitemeter.com
The same thing happened to my site/s. The first thing I thought was "Google Dance". I was on the first page for a few keywords for about 3 months. Now I've dropped out of the top 1000. It just seems like the sole purpose of the "Google Dance" is to prevent people from making a reliable income from organic search.
I had the same effect with one of my 'new' (few months) sites. I kept building links to the site and after a few months it kept at the first pages of Google for my main keywords. Now there are only minor changes sometimes.
Well, I certainly believe I've diagnosed my own problem in this regard, and if you are experiencing this recurrent deindexing, perhaps this is the cause. In my case it seemed to be a duplicate content issue related to my SSL certificate. The SSL certificate created an identical page, which Google kept deciding had more authority. My homepage was actually indexed-it just had no SERPs because all the links point to the non-SSL page. Whatever your page structure, check and see if you have a duplicate. .index.htm pages may also cause this. A simple 301 redirect solved this problem in UNDER ONE MINUTE! My next search brought my home page up correctly, and the SSL version is now deindexed. By the way, I am already doing quite well for some of my keywords-the change was instant! So if you keep disappearing and reappearing in the SERPs, make sure you don't have a duplicate URL stealing the show. Lesson learned! 301 is your friend.
So are you saying that www.site.com/index.htm is a duplicate of www.site.com? If that is the case, then maybe that will fix my problem also.
I did, but I had to remove it because it was causing problems with my orderpage, which depends on the SSL URL's that were being forwarded. (You won't have these problems). Google instantly placed the SSL version in the supplementals, so I'm going to try and attack it from robots.txt. For your issue, though, do it with mod_rewrite in .htaccess.
Your deltas are what a lot of us would call natural variability, at least in their amounts. In terms of percent it's high, but in terms of absolute visitors, it looks like you're varying in terms of 60? I get that variability or more day to day regardless of any positions.
Hello... Interesting Indeed... I have been monitering all my domains and my traffic spikes somedays and others it also drops but usually within 100 flux factor on 1 domain. Another domain that was recently built less then 2 weeks ago seen 24 indexed pages and yesterday when i checked its was at 14 indexed pages and now today 6 indexed pages. Different DCs pulling info? Im assuming that this may be due to it not having many backlinks at this time.. IF not No freakin clue unless they are DCs or hiding pages ... thx malcolm
it's an intresting thread to read . in my opinion, google is developing new algo to catch the paid links. and they are trying that for sometimes. the reason of serp changes may be
You label where Google "kills" the site twice in a row. In that case, where did it come back into Google's index? It's really only DOWN for one day because then it bounces right back up to where it was for the last 9 days (discounting that outlier spike) And it stays there for another 10 days before it's "killed" again. So, unless the site was "killed" for just one day....